Stroke severity and incidence might be stabilizing, or even decreasing over time in western countries, but this sure is not true for other parts of the world. But here is something to think about: with increasing survival, people will suffer longer from the consequences of stroke. This is of course especially true if the stroke occured at a young age.
To understand the true impact of stroke, we need to look beyond increased risk of secondary events. We need to understand how the disease affects day-to-day life, especially long term in young stroke patients. The team in Helsinki (HSYR) took a look at the pattern of young stroke patients returning to work. The results:
We included a total of 769 patients, of whom 289 (37.6%) were not working at 1 year, 323 (42.0%) at 2 years, and 361 (46.9%) at 5 years from IS.
That is quite shocking! But how about the pattern? For that we used lasagna plots, something like heatmaps for longitudinal epidemiological data. The results are above: the top panel is just the data like in our database, while the lower data has some sorting to help interpret the results a bit better.
The paper can be found here, and I am proud to say that it is open access, but you can as always just check my Mendeley profile.
Aarnio K, Rodríguez-Pardo J, Siegerink B, Hardt J, Broman J, Tulkki L, Haapaniemi E, Kaste M, Tatlisumak T, Putaala J. Return to work after ischemic stroke in young adults. Neurology 2018; 0: 1.
bob siegerink 